The Nature of Love, Intro. Study Chap. 1, 3, And 9

7/28/2019 The Nature of Love, Intro. Study Chap. 1, 3, And 9

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The Nature of Love

Dietrich von Hildebrand

Translated by

John F. Crosby with John Henry Crosby

Introductory Study by John F. Crosby

Preface by Kenneth L. Schmitz

ST. AUGUSTINES PRESS

South Bend, Indiana

2009

in association with the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Projectwww.hildebrandlegacy.org


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Introductory Study

John F. Crosby

Relatively late in life, beginning around 1958, Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889

1977) began working on a book that had been g rowing in him all his life, a

phenomenological study of love. Already in the 1920s he had received a great

deal of attention in the Catholic world for his writings on man and woman, the

love between them, and Christian marriage. He had caught the attention of the

Catholic world by his exalted vision of the lo ve between man and w oman.1

Through his meditation on this lo ve he was led to arguein fact he was one

of the first Catholic writers to arguethat the marital act has a dual meaning,

it has not only a procreative but also a unitive meaning, in other words, it not

only transmits life b ut also e xpresses conjugal love. It is no w generally

acknowledged that von Hildebrand was a pioneer of the teaching on the dual

meaning of the marital act that w as articulated at Vatican II in the chapter on

Christian marriage in Gaudium et spes . But what he envisioned later in life

was a more comprehensive phenomenological study of love in all of its cate-

gories and not just in the category of conjugal love. When his book,Das Wesen

der Liebe, appeared in 1971, it was arguably the most important phenomeno-

logical contribution to the subject since Max Schelers treatment of love in his

1913 book, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (The Nature of Sympathy).

Coming as it did at the end of a lifetime of philosophical research and

writing, this treatise is embedded in his pre vious work in philosophy, and can

be fully understood only on the background of this previous work. And so the

first purpose of this introduction is to suppl y that backg round. Those who

already know von Hildebrands previous writings may find the following dis-

cussion to be of interest insofar as it makes a contribution towards placing The

Nature of Love within the whole of his work. The second purpose of this intro-

duction is to relate von Hildebrands treatise to some recent phenomenological

work on love, especially the work of Jean-Luc Marion.

1 He expressed this vision in his books Reinheit und Jungfrulichkeit(1927) and

Die Ehe (1929). The former has been translated as Purity and the latter as

Marriage. The full bibliographical reference for these and for all w orks of von

Hildebrand cited by me in this introduction or b y von Hildebrand himself in The

Nature of Love can be found in the bibliography placed at the end of this book.


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1. Value and value-response

The first writings of von Hildebrand are in ethics, and this is in f act the area

in which he made his most signif icant contributions to philosophy. In his eth-

ical works he starts from Schelers value philosophy and develops an originalconcept of good and bad; he explores the structure of motivation, moral value

and disvalue, moral virtue and vice, and moral obligation. He also explores the

structure of the human person, especiall y the self-transcendence that persons

achieve in their moral e xistence; the Christian personalism that has been

ascribed to von Hildebrand is established in large part in the ethical writings.

My purpose here is not to sur vey the whole of the von Hildebrandian ethics,

but simply to present those themes in it that are essential for understanding his

work on love. We begin with the concept of value and the related concept of

value-response: these are foundational for e verything in v on Hildebrand,including his philosophy of love.

It is often said that the term value expresses something entirely subjective,

something relative to the person who places a value on a thing. While it is true

that many do use value in this subjectivistic sense, the term (just like Wert in

German) is capable of being used in a deeper and richer sense, as one can see

from this occurrence of the term in Shakespeare:

But value dwells not in particular will;

It holds his estimate and dignityAs well where in tis precious of itself

As in the prizer. (Troilus and Cressida, II, 1)

Even in our time value can readily mean something like precious of itself, as

when Oscar Wilde defines the cynic as the person w ho knows the price of

everything and the value of nothing, or as when C. S. Lewis writing in The

Abolition of Man embraces what he calls the doctrine of objecti ve value.

Now von Hildebrands use of value is situated within this rich potential of the

word.

Take the character of Socrates; as w e get acquainted with his wisdom,his irony, his courage, his passion for truth, we experience value in him. The

value does not depend on us the prizers, b ut we experience it as altogether

independent of us and our prizing; w e experience in Socrates something

precious of itself. We are f illed with admiration and v eneration, and we

understand why Plato and others could have venerated him as they did. Now

in order to throw value into relief von Hildebrand brings in for contrast what

he calls the importance of the subjectively satisfying. Consider the impor-

tance that another cig arette has for a hea vy smoker; the cigarette does not

present itself to him as precious of itself but is rather impor tant for himsimply because it satisf ies his craving. If the cig arette did not provide him

with satisfaction he would pass it by in complete indifference; he detects no

intrinsic excellence in it that would sustain his interest in it in the absence of

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any subjective satisfaction. He takes another cigarette to consume it, not to

revere it.

There is for von Hildebrand not only value but also disvalue, which would

be that w hich is odious of itself and not just subjecti vely dissatisfying.When we condemn some violent and cruel crime, we do not just find it dissat-

isfying; we find that it is wicked with a wickedness that is entirely independ-

ent of our subjective dissatisfaction.

We can go deeper into von Hildebrands understanding of value when we

understand why it is that all value bears beauty. It is not that he thinks that all

value is specifically aesthetic value; on the contrary, in the first chapters of his

Aesthetik Ihe distinguishes aesthetic values with precision from other v alue

domains. But he means that e ven non-aesthetic value, such as the v alue we

find in Socrates, is marked by a certain beauty. This is why the deep intuitiveexperience of a value always confers some delight on the experiencing person;

it is the delight that onl y the beautiful can gi ve. Recall the w ay in w hich

Alcibiades was fascinated by Socrates; it must have been a value-based fasci-

nation, for he mentions the beauty that he sa w in Socrates (a beauty that w as

not an aesthetic quality b ut rather a cer tain radiance of the character of

Socrates). By contrast, I find no beauty in that which appeals to me as merely

subjectively satisfying. When my subjective satisfaction is the sole deter mi-

nant of the importance that something takes on for me, then that impor tance,

much as it makes the thing attractive to me, is unable to make the thing radi-ant with beauty.

Von Hildebrand w as convinced thatto v ary the f amous utterance of

Thalesthe world is full of values. He thinks that we have to do with value in

more ways than we can count, and that our w orld, especially in its deepest

dimensions, would be disfigured beyond recognition if we bracketed all value

out of it. The expression, die Welt der Werte, or the world of values, expresses

for him all the depth and plenitude of being, as w ell as the hierarchical struc-

ture that makes our world a cosmos. Value also has a religious dimension for

him; the values of things reflect in dif ferent ways the divine glory, which forits part is also a v alue concept. Thus value for von Hildebrand was as meta-

physically potent as being. He knew nothing of the Heideggerian aversion for

value and value philosophy. Whereas Heidegger could conceive of value only

as something subjectivistically superimposed on being, v on Hildebrand con-

ceived of value as nothing other than being in all its dignity, nobility, and beau-

ty.2

But we are here concerned with the ethical and personalist use that v on

Introductory Study xv

2 I have written against this Heideggerian condemnation of v alue, giving special

attention to the particular mode of inherence that is found in the relation of v alue

to being. See m y studies, The Idea of Value and the Refor m of the Traditional

Metaphysics ofBonum inAletheia I no 2 (1978): 221336, and Are Good and

Being Really Convertible? in The New Scholasticism 57 no. 4 (1983): 465500.


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Hildebrand makes of value. For this we have to explore a certain very reveal-

ing relation in which value stands to persons w ho know about it: every thing

of value is worthy of a right response in vir tue of its value. Thus Socrates is

worthy of admiration and v eneration; persons are worthy of respect; being isworthy of re verence; God is w orthy of adoration. In each case some right

response is due to a v aluable being, or is merited by it; an elementary justice

is fulfilled when the being that is in some way precious of itself receives the

due response. Whoever admires a Socrates has the consciousness of Socrates

being worthy of admiration, has the consciousness of ones admiration not just

being a psychological fact but the fulfillment of an ought. With the importance

of the subjectively satisfying, by contrast, we have no consciousness of the

important thing being worthy of any response. The cigarette is not experienced

as worthy of the interest of the smoker.The full personalist signif icance of w hat von Hildebrand calls v alue-

response shows itself if we consider value-response not only from the side of

value, which merits the response, but also from the side of the human person,

who gives the response. Von Hildebrand often marvels at the way in which a

person transcends himselfin giving a value-response, and in fact throughout

his ethical writings he holds that the real signature of the human person lies

in this self-transcendence achieved in value-response. He speaks of self-tran -

scendence because a person who is caught up in the value of something is step-

ping beyond his own needs and, instead of seeing the world only from the pointof view of satisfying them, he sees it for w hat it is in its own right, according

to its own value, and he approaches it with re verence, responding to it with a

response that it is propor tioned to and measured by the value. By contrast, in

pursuing something as subjectively satisfying we bend the thing to the satis-

faction of our needs, seeing it onl y under the aspect of satisfying our needs,

taking no interest in what it is in its own right. In this we precisely do not tran-

scend ourselves but remain locked in our immanence, and so we give less evi-

dence of existing as persons.

Von Hildebrand does not just contrast individual acts of value-responsewith individual acts of being motivated by the subjectively satisfying; he also

contrasts two kinds of per sons. The one kind of person li ves primarily by

value-response; this person never lets his interest in the subjectively satisfying

interfere with or cur tail his reverence towards the world of value. He is still

quite capable of experiencing things subjectively satisfying and of desiring

them, but he never pursues them at the expense of the call of value. The other

kind of person li ves primarily for the subjecti vely satisfying; in the end he

ceases even to care about what is precious of itself. Here for von Hildebrand

lies the fundamental moral freedom of persons; here is the most radical self-determination of which we are capable, for here we choose between radically

opposed forms of moral existence. Von Hildebrand offers here a value-based

way of thinking about the two great loves distinguished by St. Augustine: the

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love of God that leads e ven to the contempt of self, 3 and the love of self that

leads even to the contempt of God.

But von Hildebrand attempts to achie ve greater precision regarding the

two loves. He argues that it is a cer tain kind of value-response that stands atthe center of the moral e xistence of the f irst kind of person. In speaking just

now of the beauty of v alue we were taking value in its power of drawing and

attracting us; but value sometimes also has the po wer, or rather authority, to

bind me in the manner of moral obligation. If I am tempted to do some wrong,

such as cast suspicion for a crime onto someone whom I know did not commit

it, and if I am convicted in my conscience that I must not do this, then I expe-

rience certain values of the innocent person e xercising this binding function.

The values that exercise this function get a special name in the ethics of v on

Hildebrand; he calls them morally relevant values, a term that the reader willoften encounter in the present w ork. He contrasts them with morall y irrele-

vant values, which are things that indeed form a full contrast with the impor-

tance of the merely subjectively satisfying, but are not such as to bind me with

obligation. A tree, for example, has von Hildebrandian value, a value that in

fact, when strongly experienced, commands reverence; but if I want to cut one

down for my use I do not find myself morally bound to let it stand. The tree is

something precious of itself, but it does not the po wer to bind that is the

defining note of the morally relevant values.

Von Hildebrand takes very seriously this imperative power of the morallyrelevant values, for he thinks of it, just as Cardinal Ne wman thought of it, as

being full of intimations of God. Onl y if this call is ultimatel y grounded in

God, he says, can we make sense of the way in which these values pierce me

with their unconditional call and energize my deepest freedom and elicit a kind

of obedience from me in my response to them. In chapter 4 of the present work

von Hildebrand e xplores further (beyond the pre vious ethical writings) the

special transcendence that is achie ved in relation to morall y relevant values.

He argues that the transcendence proper to all v alue-response is raised to a

higher power in the case of the v alue-response given to morally relevant val-ues. Here the implicit encounter with God calls me out of my immanence in a

far more radical way. It follows that a more precise statement of the two oppo-

site kinds of person and of the tw o opposite kinds of love would go like this:

the one person gives absolute priority to all morally relevant values, never let-

ting his interest in the subjecti vely satisfying divert him from the imperati ve

call of these values, whereas the other person is willing to scorn even morally

relevant values in the pursuit of his subjective satisfaction.

Introductory Study xvii

3 By appropriating this Augustinian formula von Hildebrand in no w ay means to

deny the existence of a well-ordered self-love that coheres entirely with the love

for God.


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2. Value in relation to that which is objectively good for a person

The reader may be puzzled at the fact that in his ethical works as well as in the

work on love von Hildebrand is frequently in debate with Thomistic philoso-

phy. This is puzzling, since the Hildebrandian ethics as so f ar outlined wouldnot seem to be controversial for Christian philosophers; it does not seem to say

anything that they do not all sa y. But there is a reason for v on Hildebrands

polemic, and it will come to light as soon as w e see why he distinguishes a

third kind of good , one different from either v alue or the impor tance of the

subjectively satisfying.

Von Hildebrand thinks that a good such as being healthy, or being educat-

ed, is not just impor tant for a person as a result of being subjecti vely satisfy-

ing for that person. When I take an interest in m y education, and realize the

importance of it, I quite understand that m y subjective satisfaction is not theprinciple or cause of the impor tance; I understand that some other , stronger

kind of importance is at stake. This is why I acknowledge a real moral fault in

myself if, at some earlier time in my life, I neglected my education. If I ought

to take an interest in my educationif in other words it is morally relevant

then there is more to the impor tance of education than its being just subjec-

tively satisfying for me. But Hildebrand thinks that this more-than-subjecti ve

importance of my education is also not the importance of value, for my educa-

tion is importantfor me in the sense that it is important for me by being bene-

ficial for me. Thus the fact that it is my education and not yours enters into theimportance that it has for me. But when some thing of value, such as the nobil-

ity of a generous person, has impor tance in my eyes, then I take an interest in

it without having any thought of receiving a benefit. If I am f illed with admi-

ration for the generous person, I ha ve no least thought of being enhanced in

my being as a result of admiring him. The nobility of his character is impor-

tant for me under the aspect of being good in its o wn right and not just bene-

ficial for me. Thus the importance exemplified in the good of my education is

importance of a third kind , reducible neither to the impor tance of the merely

subjectively satisfying nor to the impor tance of value; von Hildebrand calls itthe objective good for the person, or the benef icial good, against which

stands, in the negative, all that is objectively harmful for the person.

There is a remarkable passage in Platos Gorgias that lets us see the dif-

ference between the objective good for the person and value. Early on Socrates

is trying to convince Polus that it is worse for a human being to commit injus-

tice than to be the victim of it. What he means is that it is incomparably harm-

ful for a human being to commit injustice; he is in ef fect making a claim in

terms of von Hildebrands third kind of good/bad. Since he is having little suc-

cess in persuading P olus about this supreme har mfulness of wrongdoing, hedecides to take a different approach; he asks Polus whether wrongdoing is not

uglierthan suffering it. By taking wrongdoing under a certain aesthetic aspect,

Socrates takes it precisely as a disvalue in von Hildebrands sense. Socrates

must have switched to a dif ferent aspect of good/bad , for now Polus agrees

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with him. It is easy to transpose this result into the positi ve; then we get the

thesis that doing the just thing is supremely beneficial to the one who does it,

and that, in addition, accomplishing justice also has its o wn beauty. In von

Hildebrands language: accomplishing justice is not onl y good for the personwho accomplishes it, but also has value.

Now von Hildebrand thinks that the bonum of Thomistic philosophy cen-

ters largely around this third kind of good and does not take sufficient account

of value and of v alue-response. He has in mind the Thomistic teaching that

each being has a natural desire ( appetitus) for the fullness of being proper to

its kind, or in other words for the full actualization or perfection of its being,

and that bonum or good simply expresses this perfection or actualization con-

sidered as desirable.Bonum thus seems to von Hildebrand to be def ined in a

way that is equivalent to his third kind of goodit seems to be good under-stood as that which is beneficial or fulfilling for some person. But if good is

defined in this way, then little place is left for v alue and value-response. As a

result, he says, the Thomistic ethics4 cannot do full justice to the transcendence

that really characterizes the moral life; in place of a life centered around gi v-

ing things of value their due and obe ying the call of morall y relevant values,

we now have a life centered around the full flourishing of m yself. And

although such a life is ne ver to be confused with a life centered around the

merely subjectively satisfying,5 it is still def icient with respect to transcen-

Introductory Study xix

4 Michael Waldstein has recently questioned this von Hildebrandian interpretation

of Thomism in his study Dietrich v on Hildebrand and St. Thomas Aquinas on

Goodness and Happiness, inNova et Vetera I, no. 2 (2003): 403464. Waldstein

is, I think, right in saying that St. Thomas himself does not have to be interpreted

as holding the position summarized in this paragraph. Von Hildebrand was basing

himself on w hat he often heard cer tain Thomists say and he stopped shor t of

ascribing to St. Thomas himself this conception of good and appetitus. Waldstein

suggests that the real target of von Hildebrand is not St. Thomas but a degenerate

form of Thomism that Waldstein dubs entelechial Thomism. On the other hand,

it can hardly be claimed, and Waldstein does not claim, that St. Thomas had theconcept of value and of value-response and that he used these concepts, or equiv-

alent concepts, at the level of his theoretical discourse on good and happiness.This

means that St. Thomas does not capture the moment of transcendence in moral

action with the precision with which von Hildebrand captures it.

5 Waldstein, op. cit., especially pp. 404414, does not avoid this confusion entirely.

He speaks as if von Hildebrand were alleging that in Thomism the moral life is led

at the level of the subjecti vely satisfying. In f act, von Hildebrand never thought

that Thomism, or any school of Thomism, however degenerate, was inclined to an

ethics based on the subjectively satisfying. He thought that he discerned, it is true,

a defect of transcendence in the Thomistic account of the striving for good and for

happiness, but he took this defect to derive from the place that the objective good

for the person occupies in Thomism, which to his mind was a defect very differ-

entutterly differentfrom the defect of adv ocating a life abandoned to the

merely subjectively satisfying.


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dence. Whenever von Hildebrand deplores eudaemonism in ethics, he is

deploring a concern with my flourishing that compromises the spirit of value-

response in which I ought to live.

When, for example, I defend an innocently accused person, I do so in the con-sciousness that I o we this in justice to the other; the thought that I flourish b y

defending the other is entirely in the background. Von Hildebrand is fiercely insis-

tent on the fact that I defend the other for his or her sak e, and not f irst of all for

my sake. Of course I flourish and become happy as a result of defending the other,

and in fact happy in a way in which people who do not live by value-response can-

not be happy, but this experience of my flourishing for v on Hildebrand flows

superabundantly from my value-responding commitment to the other and func-

tions as an entirely secondary motive, a motive entirely subordinate to the value-

response to the other. Von Hildebrand makes a similar argument at the level of ourreligious existence. While we often approach God under the aspect of being

supremely beneficial for us, as when we invoke Him as savior, protector, rock of

refuge, comforter, we also approach Him under the aspect of v alue, as when we

adore Him in the consciousness that He is w orthy of adoration, or praise Him as

one who is worthy of all praise. Our religious e xistence, he argues, becomes

cramped if we always only approach Him in the f irst way; it has to be permeated

by the transcendence that is achieved in value-responding adoration and praise.

In no way, however, does von Hildebrand aim at keeping out of the moral

life all interest in things that are beneficial for me, as if the moral life were ledexclusively in and through value-response and as if any interest in what is ben-

eficial for me were an interest that falls outside of the moral life. He thinks in

fact that objective goods for myself are frequently morally relevant for me (as

we just saw in the e xample of neglecting my education) and that objecti ve

goods for other persons, so f ar as I am in a position to pro vide them for oth-

ers, are always morally relevant for me. What distinguishes his ethics is the

idea that the interest in objective goods for persons cannot be the whole of the

moral life but must be situated within value-responding affirmations of value.

In fact he makes a stronger claim: value-response should have a certain prior-ity over all interest in w hat is benef icial for persons. Thus I should be more

concerned that the innocent person be vindicated by my intervention than that

I flourish and become happ y by intervening on behalf of him or her . And I

should be more concer ned that God be e xalted and praised than that I be

blessed by Him and happy in Him.

But von Hildebrand also explores the interconnection, indeed inter pene-

tration of the tw o kinds of interest, as w hen he claims that this priority of

value-response is necessary for certain beneficial goods to be e xperienced in

all of their benef icence for me. The act of inter vening on the behalf of theinnocent person is able fully to benefit me only if the will to be benef ited is

subordinate to the will to vindicate the innocent person. I can only be happy in

God if I know how to adore Him and praise Him all for His o wn sake; if I do

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not know Him as one who is worthy of adoration, then my union with Him will

not confer all the beatitude of w hich it is capable. So in the end his objection

to what he took to be the Thomistic ethics is not that it takes bonum seriously

but that it lacks the idea of good in itself, and of serving what is good in itselffor its own sake. This means that this ethics cannot do full justice to the tran-

scendence proper to the moral life, and it means, in addition, that it cannot

unlock all those goods for persons that depend on value and that can be sought

only in conjunction with value-response.

We are about to see another aspect of this interpenetration of the two kinds

of interest; we will see ho w for von Hildebrand the transcendence of v alue-

response can be raised to a higher power when it is joined with a cer tain con-

cern for objective goods for the person.

We have now surveyed the three kinds or categories of good/bad that vonHildebrand distinguishes: the importance of the subjectively satisfying/dissat-

isfying; the objective good/evil for a person; and value/disvalue. He gives his

fullest account of these three cate gories in chapters 13 of his Ethics; these

chapters form a kind of cor nerstone of the entire philosoph y of v on

Hildebrand. It presents a theory of value and of human motivation that struc-

tures the treatise of love from beginning to end.

3. Love as a value-response

If readers know no more about von Hildebrands ethics than we have just sketchedout, they will not be at all surprised at the first chapter ofThe Nature of Love; they

could have almost predicted that he would open this work with a chapter on Love

as Value-Response. The first chapter of this work is in f act entirely devoted to

showing that love is a v alue-response to the belo ved person as beautiful. The

Platonic account of lo ve in the Symposium, 199c204c, is exactly the kind of

account that von Hildebrand wants to overcome. I do not, as Plato thought, lo ve

out of need, and I am not drawn to the beloved under the aspect of one w ho can

fulfill my need. I am drawn to the beloved as one who is lovable in his or her own

right, and I love the other for his or her o wn sake. Von Hildebrand fights againsteudaemonism in the theory of love no less than in his ethics.

He considers the objection that my love is often awakened by the good that

a person does for me, and that this seems to show that I after all love the other

under the aspect of being good for me rather than under the aspect of v alue.

Von Hildebrand responds that w hen the other is good to me, she sho ws me

something good and beautiful in her person; it is this beautya genuine datum

of valuethat engenders my love, and not the fact that the other has done good

to me. The way the other turns to me doing good to me, reveals to me the good-

ness of the other, but this is a goodness that is not reducib le to being good tome, but it is something worthy and splendid in its own right; the person, thus

revealed, stands before me as radiant and beautiful, and so a wakens in me a

value-responding love for her.

Introductory Study xxi


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Von Hildebrand takes care to avoid the idea that the beloved person is just

a specimen of some e xcellence or value, and is lovable only on the basis of

instantiating some excellence or value. If this were so, I would love the value

more than the person. So lo ve is not just an y value-response, but it is a v eryparticular one in which the value to which I respond is one with the unrepeat-

able person of the other. It is a value in which the beloved person is, as he says,

altogether thematic as this indi vidual person. Only in this way can I really

love the other for his or her o wn sake. The richest insights of von Hildebrand

into the unrepeatable individuality of a person are to be found right here in

chapter 3 of the present w ork, where he discusses the Wertgegebenheit that

enkindles love. It is understandab le that the study of lo ve would draw him

more deeply into the unrepeatab le individuality of persons than the study of

ethical existence did. When I intervene to protect the unjustly accused person,I need not be aware of or respond to the person as this individual, for I should

be ready to intervene on behalf of any other similarly accused person: but if I

love that personlove of neighbor is a separate caseI must be aware of and

respond to him or her as this unrepeatab le person and no other.

Von Hildebrand also deals with the objection that w ould reverse the rela-

tion between my love and the value of the beloved. According to this objection,

I first love, and then I invest the other with all kinds of noble qualities; far from

being grounded in the value that I have experienced in the other, my love is in

fact the source of such value. Von Hildebrand argues that it is in fact other atti-tudes mixed in with but really foreign to love that lead me to endow the other

with value. For instance, in the love between man and woman sexual desire can

lead to v alue illusions; in the lo ve of parents for their children, a cer tain

parental pride can lead to illusions about the superiority of ones own children

over other peoples children. Once these attitudes are distinguished from love,

he argues, it becomes apparent that love, while it sensitizes me to the value of

the beloved person, is characterized b y a deep re verence that inhibits v alue

illusions.

Von Hildebrand also examines the fact that each person has a deep needto love and to be loved; this is why it is so deeply fulfilling to love and why a

loveless existence is a crippled existence. This significant fact may incline us

to think that the beloved person is loved under the aspect of fulfilling this need.

But then lo ve would after all be no real v alue-response. Von Hildebrand

responds that there are many different kinds of needs, and some of them actu-

ally have a value-responding structure. Why should there not be a need to love

another for his or her own sake? a need to be captivated in a value-responding

way by the beauty of another?6 When Aristotle speaks of the natural desire of

xxii THENATURE OF LOVE

6 I take need here in a broader sense than von Hildebrand usually takes it; where-

as he usually means with this ter m something that arises in us on its o wn and

bends to itself that which satisfies it, I use it here to mean an ything in the human

person that provides the basis for fulf illment.


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all human beings to kno w, he means of course to kno w things as the y really

are; only knowledge in this sense could fulf ill the desire. Why then should it

be surprising that the need to love can only be fulf illed when I am moved by

the inner splendor, the real worthiness and value of a person?7The first thing we want to show, then, is that von Hildebrand in his trea-

tise on love continues along the line of his earlier ethical work. Self-transcend-

ing value-response is in its own way just as important for his account of love

as it was for his account of moral action and moral virtues. The resolute oppo-

sition to eudaemonism that be gan in his ethical w orks continues here in his

treatise on love. We could say, using language that is not von Hildebrands, that

he wants the beloved person to appear in all his or her otherness; any intrusion

of me and my needs and my desire for happiness must be e xcluded if I am to

encounter the other so as really to love him or her.

4. Love as a super value-response

But at the same time von Hildebrand notices that the transcendence that he had

studied in ethics is modif ied in the case of some kinds of lo ve. As a master

phenomenologist he would never simply transfer to lo ve all the patter ns of

transcendence found in the moral life. He observes that the imperative moment

that he studied in connection with morall y relevant values is not found in the

love between friends nor is it found in the lo ve between man and w oman,

which he regards as the most eminent kind of lo ve. For it is never a matter ofstrict moral obligation to enter into friendship with a certain person or to enter

into a man-woman love relation with a certain person. The imperative moment

is indeed found in two kinds of love, namely in love of neighbor and in lo ve

for God, but it is not found in the other categories of love. Thus a certain power

of moral transcendence is not proper to them. On the other hand , these loves

have certain perfections of transcendence that are not found in the moral life.

In this book von Hildebrand is always tracking the ways in which persons tran-

scend themselves and is al ways examining how the transcendence of lo ve is

both like and unlike the transcendence achieved in a well-ordered moral exis-tence.

Thus he argues, building on his earlier study of human affectivity,8 that in

loving another I take an affective delightin the other. If I exercise only my will,

but not my heart, then however favorable to the other my willing may be, how-

ever beneficent, I do not really love the other. For this affective energy proper

to all loveand he says that no other response is affective in the way that love

islets me be fully present in my love, present with my whole self, with my

real self, my intimate self; as a result it lets me gi ve myself to the other in a

way in which, exercising the will alone, I cannot give myself, and so it lets me

Introductory Study xxiii

7 This train of thought, clearl y, lends itself to ser ving as a bridge betw een the

Thomistic ethics and the Hildebrandian ethics.

8 Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart, especially Part I, chapter 8.


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transcend myself towards the other in a new way. This rich vein of thought on

the affectivity of love is based in v on Hildebrand on his v alue theory. For

value, especially considered under the aspect of the beauty that it gi ves off,

delights; value is revealed as value precisely through its capacity to delight, toaffect, to move the hear t. Thus the beloved person, appearing radiant with

value, awakens my love by moving me af fectively. Above we distinguished

between the power of value to attract or draw a person, and the po wer of

(morally relevant) value to bind or oblige a person. In love it is above all the

former power that is at work. When value exercises its binding function, giv-

ing rise to an ob ligatory action, then it addresses m y will; b ut insofar as it

draws me to another in lo ve, it addresses my heart. And though the will that

bows before the obligation achieves a unique kind of transcendence, as we saw,

the person who loves with affective plenitude achieves a different kind of tran-scendence towards the beloved person.

Von Hildebrand considers another form of transcendence that is proper to

love; he gives it a special name, super v alue-response, a term that appears

here for the first time in von Hildebrands corpus. It cannot be my goal here to

offer a full discussion of super v alue-response, but simplyin accordance

with the limited pur pose of this introductionto sho w how von Hildebrand

employs the categories of his ethics in order to for m this new concept.

Let us go back to good in the sense of that w hich is objectively good for

some person. Good in this sense can be reduced neither to v alue nor to theimportance of the merely subjectively satisfying, as we saw. This kind of good

plays a major role in raising love from the status of value-response to the sta-

tus of a super value-response. This seems surprising at first glance, since we

explained value-response in distinction to an interest in what is beneficial for

me: how then can this interest serve to raise value-response to a higher power

of value-response?

I enter into a relation of love with someone. It would not be a relation of

love if I did not stand in a v alue-responding relation to the other , as we saw,

but my transcendence towards the other is not limited to value-response. For Iam happy in loving the other and in being lo ved by the otherhappy in the

sense not just of being subjectively satisfied, but rather of being deeply, grate-

fully happy. This means that the belo ved person, and our relationship, is an

eminent case of something objectively good for me. At the same time I become

something objectively good for the beloved person, who finds her happiness in

her relation to me. No w von Hildebrand ar gues that I gi ve myself to th e

beloved person in a unique w ay by willing to be the source of her happiness;

he also argues that I give myself to the other by willing to receive from her my

own deepest happiness. But this self-gi ving, though based on w hat is objec-tively good for a person, is a dimension of transcendence towards the other all

its own; it is a transcendence that goes be yond the transcendence of v alue-

response; it is that which makes love a super value-response.

xxiv THENATURE OF LOVE


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It is true that, in the abstract, to tak e an interest in something objecti vely

good for me lacks the transcendence of a v alue-responding affirmation of

something in it o wn right. But if the objecti ve good for me is embedded in

value-response, as it is in the case of lo ve, then my interest in this good canjoin with my value-response in such a w ay as to effect a self-giving that sur-

passes the value-response alone and that qualifies as a super value-response.

The reader should give the closest attention to all that v on Hildebrand writes

about this embeddedness; he offers here a real dialectical feast of things inter-

penetrating each other despite the appearance of excluding each other.

It follows that even though love (apart from love of neighbor and love for

God) lacks the transcendence achieved in relation to morally relevant values,

it has its own singular transcendence, a transcendence that becomes intelligi-

ble, surprisingly, when we consider how the one who loves finds his own goodand happiness in the beloved person.

5. The requital of love

But in his treatise on love von Hildebrand makes still more use of his concept

of that which is objectively good for a person. He argues that the interest of the

lover in what is good for himself not onl y enhances his love; von Hildebrand

also argues that if the lover lacks this interest in his goodan interest al ways

embedded in value-response, it goes without sa yingthen his love becomes

disfigured, and in the end depersonalized in a cer tain way.Let us suppose that someone is zealous for the selflessness and other-cen-

teredness that characterize love, and that this person proceeds to propound a

radically altruistic account of lo ve, and to propound it in the ter ms of von

Hildebrands ethics. Such a person might be gin by saying that love should be

lived exclusively as value-responseexclusively in the sense that the lo ver

should renounce any and every interest in his o wn good and his o wn happi-

ness. This altruist might add that one can, in presenting the altr uistic ideal of

love, also make use of von Hildebrands concept of the objecti ve good for a

person, but only in this way: the lover is concerned with all that is good for thebeloved person, that is, he seeks out things for the other precisel y under the

aspect of them being good for the belo ved person.9 But the good for himself

that arises from lovingthis he renounces. So his love is radically other-cen-

tered in two von Hildebrandian ways: he stands in a value-responding relation

to the beloved person and he is committed to all that is good for him or her .

Introductory Study xxv

9 In chapter 7 of the present work von Hildebrand explores with precision and sub-

tlety this for the good of the other that is proper to lo ve. In the previous chap-

ters he had explained (in connection with super v alue-response) how the otherbecomes an objective good for the one who loves; in chapter 7 he explains how the

one who loves so enters into w hat is good for the other that this good becomes

indirectly good for the one who loves.


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The altruist thinks that by loving without any interest in acquiring some good

or happiness for himself, he perfects this other-centered direction of love, and

so perfects love itself.

We already know what one of von Hildebrands responses to this altr uis-tic proposal would be; he would say that it compromises the transcendence of

love as super value-response and that it interferes with the self-giving prop-

er to love. Let us now add another response that he would make; he would say

that this interference leads to a caricature of love, as we can see if we imagine

a man saying to a woman: I love you for what you are, for your own sake, but

whether you love me in return I dont care, and I dont care if our love is mutu-

al and is a source of happiness for me; I w ant nothing for myself, I just want

your good and y our happiness. Such a man kno ws nothing about the lo ve

between man and woman; and far from raising his love to a high pitch of self-lessness, he in fact insults the woman, as von Hildebrand observes. Thus altru-

ism, while it poses as supreme love, in fact makes a mockery of love. It turns

out, then, that the interest of the lo ver in his o wn happiness is not just an

optional enhancement of love, but is an indispensable ingredient of love, with-

out which love becomes severely deformed.

In his book von Hildebrand tries to explain why this deformation results.

He takes very seriously this fact about the genius of love: in loving another

I want to be loved in return by the other. This is obvious in the case of the love

between man and w oman, but it is hardl y less obvious in the lo ve betweenfriends, or between parents and children. In all of these kinds, or categories, of

love, I remain painfull y exposed if I of fer love to someone w ho does not

return my love; I cannot f ail to be disappointed b y non-requital. If the other

does return my love, then I am happy in being loved, and happy in the bond of

mutual love that arises between us. So if I love the other I want this happiness

of being united with the other; I cannot not w ant it. Von Hildebrand thus

acknowledges that the issue of my happiness comes up in a different and more

prominent way here in the case of love than it does in the case of moral action,

and that as a result the debate with eudaemonism tak es a different form withlove than with moral action.

Now it is a huge mistake, von Hildebrand says, to see as in any way self-

ish this will to be loved in return and this will to be happy by being united with

the beloved person: and it is just the mirror image of this mistake to think that

my love is particularly selfless when I renounce any interest in being loved in

return and when I renounce any interest in being happy in a mutual love, as if

love became more truly love by taking on the altruistic form just described. Of

course, if my offer of love were in some way conditional on the other person

requiting my loveif I were proposing to the belo ved person a kind of con-tract or exchangethen we would understandably detect something selfish in

my will to be loved in return. But in fact nothing prevents me from loving the

other unconditionally, even though I hope for a requital of m y love. The

xxvi THENATURE OF LOVE


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altruist who wants to suppress all interest in his happiness is tr ying to live

beyond the reciprocity that belongs essentiall y to love, and for this reason he

produces a deformation of love.

Von Hildebrand identifies one reason that draws us into the altruistic mis-take. He examines throughout his book the v arious categories or kinds of

love, such as the love between man and woman, the love between friends, the

love of children for their parents, or parents for their children. Among these

categories is love of neighbor, as exemplified by the Good Samaritan. No w

love of neighbor seems to be rather dif ferent from the other categories of love

with respect to the desire for a retur n of love. The Good Samaritan does not

seem to be waiting for the injured man whom he helped to love him in return,

nor will he go away disappointed if his love is not returned, or at least not go

away disappointed in the way in which I am disappointed if someone to whomI offer friendship does not want to be my friend. It belongs to this category of

love that the issue of m y happiness, so prominent in the other cate gories,

recedes into the background. This category of love really is other-centered in

a special way. Now if we take love of neighbor as the patter n of all love, then

we move towards the altruistic conception of love. Von Hildebrand argues that

we should not take it as the pattern of all love; we should see it as one catego-

ry of love among others. The love between friends, categorially very different

from love of neighbor, is also love; it has the value-responding structure prop-

er to all love; but it can be the kind of love that it is only if each friend is con-cerned with a return of the others love and with the happiness of being united

with the other.

But if we are really to understand the disorder of the altr uistic ideal of

love, and to understand why it is indispensable for the lover to take an interest

in his own happiness in loving, we have to follow von Hildebrand to a deeper

level of analysis.

6. Love andEigenleben

Von Hildebrand holds that the person w ho tries to love in this selfless w aydepersonalizes himself. He does not take himself seriously as person; he does

not remain entirely intact as person as a result of his w ay of centering exclu-

sively on the beloved person. Since von Hildebrand, as we saw, thinks of the

person so much in terms of transcendence and value-response, it is natural to

ask whether this selfless person seems to us depersonalized because of some

defect of transcendence. But no sooner do we ask this than we see that it is not

a defect of this transcendence at all; on the contrary, in this person we see self-

transcendence grown monstrous. No, he is depersonalized as a result of an

entirely different defect, namely a def icient relation to himself. This meansthat a human being is constituted as person not just in the moment of self-tran-

scendence, but also in the moment of relating to himself. It is, then, a cer tain

interior dimension of personal self-possession that comes to light at this point

Introductory Study xxvii


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in von Hildebrands treatise on love and that completes all that he had said in

his ethical writings about the self-transcending, ecstatic capacity of the per-

son in value-response.

Von Hildebrand e xplores this interior dimension under the name ofEigenleben, a new term that appears here for the f irst time in his cor pus. No

German word in this work presented a g reater challenge to me as translator

than the wordEigenleben. I settled in the end for subjecti vity,10but some-

times I just keep the German term, and I will keep it in the present discussion.

Of particular interest for us is that von Hildebrand characterizesEigenleben in

terms of good in the sense of the objecti ve good for a person: The def ining

trait ofEigenleben is the realm of all those things that are of concern to me as

this unrepeatable individual, that stand in some relation to m y happiness, that

address methis in contrast to all that belongs to the Eigenleben of anotherperson whom I do not kno w (203). If in transcending m yself in v alue-

response I give myself over to what is other than myself, in myEigenleben I

have to do with w hat is my own. The pronouns I and me and mine belong to

myEigenleben.

It is impor tant for us to consider with v on Hildebrand how central the

place ofEigenleben is in the e xistence of a person. He sa ys: To have an

Eigenleben in this sense . . . is a deeply significant characteristic of the human

being as spiritual person and is profoundly associated with human dignity and

with the metaphysical condition of human beings (201). And in the followinghe contrasts this aspect of the dignity of persons with that other aspect that, as

we saw above, is disclosed in the capacity for value-responding self-transcen-

dence:

Whoever does not acknowledge the transcendence of human beings

[in value-response] fails to understand w hat distinguishes them as

persons from all impersonal creatures. But whoever smells something

egocentric in the fact that I desire an objective good for myself, who-

ever thinks that the ideal of human life is for me to lose all interest in

things good for myself, fails to understand the character of the human

person as subject. Such a one f ails to see the m ysterious center to

which everything in my life as person is refer red, the center that is

addressed by beneficial goods and that is inseparab ly bound up with

the dignity of a person. If the first error locks me in myself and in this

way distorts my ultimate relation to the w orld . . . the second er ror

deprives me of my character as a full self. The first error reduces me

to the biological, taking me according to the model of a plant or ani -

mal. The second error robs me of my character as a full subject and

xxviii THENATURE OF LOVE

10 For my justification of this translation, see my note at the beginning of chapter 9,

p. 200.


18/97

destroys the personal in me by exaggerating the objective to the point

of dissolving that which makes me subject (206).

This depreciation of the Eigenleben of the human person is for v on

Hildebrand the root of the e xtreme altruistic ideal of love. In renouncing all

interest in being loved and in being happy by being loved, the altruist neglects

this mysterious center in himself, neglects himself as subject, and for this rea-

son he neglects his dignity as person. Von Hildebrand gives many interesting

examples of what he calls witheredEigenleben, and some of them represent

vintage altruism. Thus in one place he speaks of a type of person w ho lives

with a family as an old servant of the lady of the house, or perhaps as a friend

of hers, and who shares the life of the f amily and has her whole life in caring

for the children and the household. These are usually persons who do not feel

up to having a full Eigenleben of their own, whose aspirations for happiness

are weak and modest, whose primary relation to the great goods of life is weak

and who therefore incline to attach themselves to the lives of others . . . (204)

This altruistic person does not in the f irst place lack transcendence, for she

may be extremely devoted to the family members; but she lacks Eigenleben;

she lacks the desire for her own happiness that belongs to being a fully awak-

ened person. It is of course also true that her transcendence towards the mem-

bers of the family is impaired; she would be able to turn to them in a more rad-

ically other-centered way if she acquired a stronger Eigenleben. But von

Hildebrand does not think ofEigenleben as existing exclusively for the sake of

enhancing transcendence; it has a meaning of its o wn, existing also for the

sake of the person whoseEigenleben it is.

Von Hildebrand is also well aware that there is a way of invoking religion

to discredit theEigenleben of persons and to present self-transcendence as the

only thing that reall y matters before God. In the follo wing he considers this

religiously driven altruism and then he rejects it:

Now one might think that the possession ofEigenleben in our earthly

existence belongs to the things that are allowed, but that it is moreperfect to give it up in the sense of desiring no personal objective good

for myself and remaining in an exclusively value-responding attitude.

Is not the attitude of seeking only the kingdom of God simply an aug-

mentation of the attitude of seeking firstthe kingdom of God? . . . By

no means.Eigenlebenbelongs to the nature of the human person.. . . .

This becomes clear in thinking about the sacred humanity of Christ.

Even the Son of Man w ept at the death of Lazar us. . . . We cannot

stress this enough: Eigenlebenbelongs to the meaning and nature of

a human being . . . (215)

In a much earlier work (Transformation in Christ) von Hildebrand dealt with

the structure of Christian humility , in the course of w hich he distinguished

Introductory Study xxix


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certain forms of pseudo-humility, such as thinking of oneself in ter ms of a

quantitative smallness, as if each human being were just an insignificant speck

in an immense universe. If he had hadEigenleben on his mind when he wrote

that earlier work, he would certainly have identified the religiously motivateddepreciation ofEigenleben as a form of pseudo-humility, and he would have

argued that even before God, or rathermost of allbefore God, myEigenleben

is something important and refuses to be relativized into insignificance.

Von Hildebrand acknowledges, then, that the objective good for a person

plays a different and larger role in love than in moral action. It not only under-

lies that new dimension of transcendence in lo ve that he calls super v alue-

response, as we saw above; it also underlies an interior dimension of person-

al existenceEigenlebenthat shows itself in lo ve in an eminent w ay. Von

Hildebrands image of the human person is fundamentall y enlarged in thiswork; the earlier stress on transcendence is here de veloped into a polarity of

transcendence andEigenleben. And the category of the objective good for the

person is the basic conceptual tool b y which von Hildebrand thinks through

this enlargement of his personalism.

Von Hildebrand often uses these results to bring clarity to the question of

what counts as the selflessness that we admire in love, and what counts as the

selfishness that disfigures love. Thus he argues that it is not self ish to want to

have anEigenleben; it is not selfish to want to be loved in return; it is not self-

ish to want to be happ y in lovingas long, of course, as these desires areembedded in the value-responding affirmation of the beloved person. In other

words, selflessness does not require indifference to onesEigenleben, indiffer-

ence to being lo ved in return, or indif ference to being happ y in loving. Far

from promoting a morall y admirable selflessness, such indif ference under-

mines ones dignity as a personal self. What is condemned as self ish is com-

monly nothing other than the care of onesEigenleben, which in itself is moral-

ly praiseworthy.

The reader will notice that these impor tant distinctions can hardl y be

made if one does not distinguish with von Hildebrand between the merely sub-jectively satisfying and the objective good for a person. If one collapses the lat-

ter into the former, then one is sure to think of a strong Eigenleben in terms of

selfishness. And one will ne ver attain to the concept of a super v alue-

response, since one will ha ve depreciated the very factorthe well-ordered

concern for ones own happinessthat makes for a super value-response.

7. Von Hildebrand and recent phenomenological work on love

I said above that a second purpose of this introduction is to set von Hildebrand

in relation to some recent phenomenological work on the nature of love.If von Hildebrand were alive today and were to examine this recent work,

he would be struck by the fact that eudaemonism in the philosophy of love is

no longer strongly represented, whereas altruism is dominant. He would see to

xxx THENATURE OF LOVE


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his surprise that the task is not so much to refute eudaemonism as rather to

defend against extreme forms of altr uism the interest of the lo ver in being

loved, and in being happy in being loved. This altruism is perhaps nowhere so

much in evidence as in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Here we encounter thecontrast between love that fulf ills the need of the lo ver, also called concupis-

cence and sometimes eros, and love that is based on the imperious claim of my

neighbor, the absolutely Other, also called love without concupiscence, and

sometimes agape.11 This latter love is presented in radicall y other-centered

termsso radical that it seems to many of Levinass critics to be impossible to

achieve in action. Thus John Caputo calls Le vinasian love of neighbor an

impossible dream.12

Certainly von Hildebrand w ould welcome the anti-eudaemonism that is

found in Levinass account of love of neighbor. Levinas for his part, one wouldthink, would welcome the strong stress on for the sak e of the other found in

von Hildebrand. He would presumably also welcome much that von Hildebrand

says about the transcendence proper to the moral life. But von Hildebrand would

wonder whether the other -centeredness of the one w ho loves is allowed by

Levinas to be penetrated b y the interest that this person might tak e in his own

good and happiness. He w ould wonder whether Levinas acknowledges a self-

giving that is precisely enhanced by the way in which the good of the lover enters

into the self-giving; whether Levinas is open to the polarity of Eigenleben and

transcendence; whether Levinas has what von Hildebrand regards as the tr ueconcept of self ishness/selflessness. He w ould look closel y to see w hether

Levinas saw the need of moving beyond both eudaemonism and altruism. These

questions coming from von Hildebrand reach into the heart of what Levinas has

been doing. They show that the two philosophers have much to say to each other

and many ways of challenging each other.

The encounter between von Hildebrand and Levinas is a project waiting

to be car ried out. Another such project is the encounter betw een von

Hildebrand and Karol Wojtyla. One could focus this project not around the

altruism/eudaemonism issue, b ut around the role of af fectivity in lo ve.Following Max Scheler, von Hildebrand lays great stress on the affective char-

acterof love, as we saw. If one does not take delight in the other, he says, one

does not love the other. Perhaps no one has e ver explored and affirmed the

affectivity of loving in the way von Hildebrand has. Now Wojtyla, too, is great-

ly indebted to Scheler , and his w ork shows many of the e xcellences of phe-

nomenology; but in his account of love Wojtyla seems to make more of the will

than von Hildebrand does. If one comes from reading w hat von Hildebrand

Introductory Study xxxi

11 On these two kinds of love in Levinas, see Corey Beals,Levinas and the Wisdomof Love (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), chapters 2 and 3.

12 John Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993),

82.


21/97

writes on love as the most affective of all value-responses (see especially chap-

ters 2, 4, and 10), one is bound to be per plexed on reading this in Wojtyla:

The emotions themselves [of sympathy and liking for the other] can commit

the will, but only in a passive and somewhat superficial fashion, with a certainadmixture of subjectivism. Friendship, however, demands a sincere commit -

ment of the will with the fullest possib le objective justification.13 The ques-

tion to be e xplored is w hether the tw o thinkers are focusing on dif ferent

aspects of the one truth about love, or whether there is a debate between them

that needs to be worked through.

I turn now to a project that I do not just propose to others b ut actually try

to initiate myself. I turn to Jean-Luc Marion and to his recent book, The Erotic

Phenomenon. Marion gives us here a rich phenomenolo gy of love that has

many points of contact with von Hildebrands work. And while there are manyrespects in which Marion and v on Hildebrand converge, I would like to call

attention to an apparent point of tension betw een them, not so as to be quar-

relsome but so as to gi ve an example of the fruitful dialogue that is possib le

between von Hildebrand and contemporary phenomenologists writing on love.

Von Hildebrand claims that lo ve is a v alue-response, as w e saw. Now

Marion posits a relation betw een love and knowledge that puts into question

the response-character of love. He writes in one place: Properly speaking, she

(the lover) does not know that which she loves, because what one loves does

not appear before one loves it. It is up to the lo ver to make visible what is atissuethe other as belo ved . . . . Kno wledge does not mak e love possible,

because knowledge flows from love. The lover makes visible what she loves

and, without this love, nothing would appear to her. Thus, strictly speaking, the

lover does not know what she lovesexcept insofar as she loves it.14 Marion

does not mean, of course, that the loverinvests the beloved with a splendor that

the beloved does not really have; he seems to mean that the lo verreveals the

splendor really there in the beloved. But on his view the lover does not begin

to love by responding to the splendor of the belo ved person, for it is his lo ve

that first makes the beloved person appear in all her splendor.Von Hildebrand holds that the lover loves because he has caught a glimpse

of the beauty of the beloved. This beauty affects the lover and fascinates him

in such a way as to awaken his love. As a result he holds that the love initiated

by the lover is responsive to some beauty in the beloved person. He would cer-

tainly have invoked the unforgettable account of love in the middle of Platos

Phaedrus. For von Hildebrand, as for Plato, it is the sight of beauty in the

beloved person that stirs up the madness of lo ve in the lo ver. But Marion

xxxii THENATURE OF LOVE

13 Karol Wojtyla,Love and Responsibility (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux Inc.,1981), 92.

14 Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen Le wis (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2007), 87.


22/97

seems to exclude from his account of love this engendering power of the beau-

ty glimpsed by the lover in the beloved person, for he wants love to precede all

that one apprehends in the beloved person, and to bring it to light for the f irst

time. This is why, as I understand him, he introduces the principle of insuffi-cient reason in e xplaining the initiative of the lo ver. Since the lo ver loves

without the support of any apprehended beauty in the beloved person, he loves

without sufficient reason.

Of course, von Hildebrand would grant that the beauty of a person does

not show itself equally to every kind of looking. Marion speaks several times

of the act of sizing up a persons qualities, the strong and weak points of the

person, and he sa ys quite rightly that this objecti ve way of looking cannot

lead me to love this person. For this is a kind of looking at another that yields

only an object, a composite of qualities, and not a beloved person. It is not dif-ficult to understand that it takes a loving way of looking at another in order to

catch sight of the beauty of the person. This means that lo ve does indeed in

some sense precede and make possible the appearance of the other as beauti-

ful and lovable, just as Marion says.

But von Hildebrand would say that the relation between love and knowl-

edge is a mutual relation. He would say that once the beauty of the other is dis-

closed to the lo ver by virtue of his lo ving approach to the other , this beauty

engenders love in the lover and motivates him to love the other. In other words,

the priority of love over knowledge would seem quickly to yield to a cer tainpriority of knowledge over love. Of course, once his lo ve is engendered b y

apprehended beauty, the lover would seem to be empo wered thereby to see

more deeply into the beauty of the beloved. So the priority of love over knowl-

edge would reassert itselfonly to yield again to the priority of the now more

visible beauty over the love that it elicits no w more deeply than before. The

principle at work in this mutuality is f amiliar to every student of the Aristo-

telian account of vir tue. On the one hand , virtuous character is b uilt up by

morally worthy actions, but on the other hand , virtuous character also facili-

tates these actions. Virtuous character is, in relation to action, both cause andeffect. This would mean that Marions statement, just cited, Knowledge does

not make love possible, because knowledge flows from love, captures only

part of the truth about knowledge and love as they exist in the one who initi-

ates love. This would also mean that the lover is not as lacking in some suf-

ficient reason for his initiative of love as Marion says.

Let us try to understand Marions position better by inquiring into his rea-

son for holding it. If I read him cor rectly, his position is based on his concep-

tion of love as gift. Marion claims, echoing Der rida as well as his own earlier

analysis of the structure of the gift, that the one who loves steps out of any andevery framework of exchange and commercial reciprocity. The lover does not

love on the condition thathe receive something in return from the beloved per-

son, but rather loves unconditionally; he loves whether he is loved in return or

Introductory Study xxxiii


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hated in return. It is in the course of zealously contending for this uncondition-

ality of the lovers initiative that Marion affirms his principle of the priority of

love over knowledge. He fears perhaps that if lo ve is awakened by something

about the beloved, if love constitutes itself as lo ve through the e xperience ofand in response to the beloved person, then the lover may start seeking some

quid pro quo in loving and may thus lose the unconditionality that makes love

to be love. He may see his fear confirmed by the fact that von Hildebrand lays

great stress on the lover hoping for some requital of his love. So Marion is try-

ing to secure this unconditionality b y affirming the principle of insuf ficient

reason for the lover and by making the love of the lover always only precede

the knowledge of the beloved person but never follow upon this knowledge.

To this von Hildebrand would respond that there is no good reason w hy

the lover, just by being drawn by the beauty of the beloved person, has to fallaway from his love into some kind of justice-based exchange. It all depends on

the concept of value that is brought to your phenomenological examination of

the beloved. If you think, in the vein of the Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine of

bonum, that whatever attracts me attracts me under the aspect of perfecting me

and actualizing my nature, then there is indeed some cause for concern; I may

really forfeit the unconditionality that is so impor tant to Marion if a concer n

for my perfection controls my interest in the other. If Marion sees no alter na-

tive to such an interest, then we understand entirely the move he makes, name-

ly holding that love arises independently of and prior to any acquaintance withand attraction to the beloved person. But what if there is an alter native? What

if von Hildebrand is right that the beauty that engenders love is a beauty born

of value, and that the lover is first of all drawn to the beloved not as one who

is beneficial for me or perfective of me but rather of worthy in herself

or precious of herself ? In this case m y value-based interest in the other

coheres entirely with a radicall y other-centered approach to the other . Von

Hildebrandian value-response is just as foreign to the economy ofquid pro quo

as anything that Marion says about the advance of the lover.

As for the concer n that Marion w ould likely have regarding vonHildebrands strong stress on desiring requital, we have already tried to explain

why the lover desiring requital does not have to make receiving requital a con-

dition for his loving.

But perhaps Marion will sa y that by stressing the response-character of

love we conceive of love as too reactive. Even if the love of the lover does not

decline into some kind ofquid pro quo, it is still deprived of its gesture of tak-

ing the initiative and giving a gift; for now it simply registers what is given in

the beloved and reacts in proportion to the excellence of the beloved. It is as if

the lover by loving just gives to the beloved what is due to her in justice. Wecan capture the freedom of the lovers gift, Marion will say, only if we cut the

advance of the lover loose from any beauty that elicits his love, only if we place

the entire source of his advance in his free initiative.

xxxiv THENATURE OF LOVE


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In response, v on Hildebrand acknowledges that the beauty seen in the

beloved person does not have the effect of strictly obliging the lover to love the

beloved, as w e saw; his initiati ve to lo ve remains a free spontaneous act,

beyond all obligation. But why should beauty not a waken love and motivatelove without interfering with the free initiative to love? Consider this parallel,

taken indeed from an entirely different order of being, yet relevant to our ques-

tion. It seems that the goodness of creation in some way motivated God to cre-

ate, for He repeatedly says (Genesis 1) as He goes through the days of creation

that the works of His hands are good, very good. And yet His initiative to cre-

ate was absolutely free. So a motive of value or beauty need not interfere with

the free initiative of the act that is motivated.

But there is another reser vation that Marion possibly has about invoking

value for the pur pose of understanding the initiati ve of the lover. Perhaps hewould say that this recourse to value is entirely inappropriate to what he calls

the phenomenality of the belo ved, who after all appears to the lo ver as

unsubstitutable, unrepeatable. The idea behind this response is that if one

invokes value for thinking about the beloved, then the beloved becomes a mere

instance or specimen of the v alue invoked; but in becoming a mere instance

the beloved is lost as unsubstitutab le and so is lost as belo ved, and the lover

ends up loving the value more than the person.

Marion is absolutely right about the beloved appearing as unsubstitutable,

and in fact he expresses this important truth forcefully and convincingly in hisbook, especially when he develops the contrast betw een the unsubstitutable

beloved and the anonymous other as encountered in transactions of commer-

cial exchange.15 On this point von Hildebrand is in complete ag reement with

him. We have already examined his idea, developed in chapter 3 of the present

work, that the v alue to w hich love responds must be a v alue in w hich the

beloved person is entirely thematic; in other w ords, it must be a v alue that

the beloved person has as this unrepeatable person. Von Hildebrand would

respond to Marions concern by asking: what is the difficulty here? Why does

a value have to begin as some general quality , so that a v aluable being onlyinstantiates the value? Why should not the radiance of value and beauty found

in the beloved person be unsubstitutable just as the beloved person is unsubsti-

tutable?

Let us return to Marions claim that the lover has no sufficient reason for

loving. Von Hildebrand might also acknowledge a certain kind of insufficient

reason for loving, but he would explain it in ter ms of the inef fability of the

beauty of the beloved person. For von Hildebrand the insufficiency would be

an insufficiency of reasons that the lover can formulate for loving this person,

but it would not be an insufficiency of beauty appearing in the beloved personand eliciting the lo ve of the lover. Von Hildebrands insufficiency is, then,

Introductory Study xxxv

15 Ibid.pp. 7778


25/97

different from, and less than, Marions. And if von Hildebrand were asked to

explain the way in which the lover chooses the beloved without making com-

parisons with other possible recipients of love, he would say that this mysteri-

ous choosing or election of the belo ved is not made understandab le by theabsence of any knowledge of the belo ved, but by the presence of a kind of

knowledge of the incommunicable preciousness of the beloved. At the level of

incommunicable persons, comparisons cannot be meaningfull y made; at this

level persons are incommensurab le with each other and so are incomparab le

with each other. Thus the knowledge on the basis of which the lover loves can-

not be gained or enhanced by making comparisons with other personsbut a

kind of knowledge it really is, and a kind of reason for loving it really is.

We conclude by observing that it would seem to be of no little importance

for the phenomenology of love to acknowledge with von Hildebrand this roleof the beauty of the beloved in awakening love. For one could well wonder if

the beloved person will reall y feel loved if the lo ver advances towards her

entirely on his own initiative and is already fully constituted as lover prior to

being drawn by her. Will she not feel that his lo ve shoots over her head, as it

were, and is not sufficiently a lovefor her? Will she not feel somehow ignored

as person if she provides no part of the reason for the advance of the lover? It

is one thing for the Good Samaritan to approach the w ounded man knowing

nothing about him, to tak e an initiati ve of love without knowing anything

about him beyond the fact of his being injured and in urgent need of help. Butit is something else, and something far more problematic, for man and woman,

or for friends, to lo ve each other without kno wing each other and without

being drawn to each other b y what they know. If, on the other hand , von

Hildebrand is right about love being engendered by the beauty of the beloved

person, then there is no danger of the belo ved person feeling bypassed by the

lover.

And this leads to another question. As Marion shows convincingly, I am

empowered to love myself only by being loved. Left to myself I end in self-

hatred, he argues. But if I am loved entirely on the initiative of the lover, pro-viding through myself nothing that might awaken his love, does his love, von

Hildebrand would ask, have the power to enable me to love even myself? Can

his love really mediate to me the goodness of m y existence if his love arises

without in any way being motivated by the goodness of my existence?

We do not mean to of fer here a f inished von Hildebrandian critique of

Marion. After all, we have not dealt with Marions philosophical project as a

whole. Marion might well make some response that w ould continue the dia-

logue. We have only wanted to start the dialogue with Marion so as to show the

great fruitfulness of von Hildebrands treatise on love. We have wanted to showthat von Hildebrand addresses the concer ns of philosophers and theolo gians

like Levinas, Wojtyla, and Marion, and challenges them in v arious ways. He

speaks with a powerful and original voice that has been neglected for too long

in the discussions and debates of our time about the nature of lo ve.

xxxvi THENATURE OF LOVE


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CHAPTERONE

Love as Value-Response

Love in the most proper and most immediate sense is love foranotherperson,

whether it be the love of a mother for her child, the love of a child for its par-

ents, the love between friends, the love between man and woman, the love forGod, or the love of neighbor. Love for non-personal things, such as the love for

a nation or a homeland or a countr y or a work of art or a house, bears onl y a

certain analogy to love. But it is much closer to love in the proper sense than

is self-love.

The false analogy between love and being-attached

to something merely subjectively satisfying

All ways of being attached to things like food, drink, money, etc. cannot be

called love even in an analo gous sense, for the y are precisely distinguishedfrom love in the most important point. The heavy drinker does not love alco-

hol, the greedy man does not love money. They are no doubt attached to these

things and are under the po wer of them; these things ha ve an indescribable

attractive power for such people. But being attached, something which is also

found in love, is here so dif ferent in kind, the power of attraction is in both

cases so different, that we have a misleading analogy. In the introduction to this

work we have already pointed out the danger of such analo gies.

Thus the nature of love is necessarily misunderstood by starting from the

phenomenon of being attached to something. The distinctive character oflove, its specif ic nature implies precisel y the contrast with all these other

forms of being attached to something. The difference which is here at stake

is the same fundamental dif ference which runs through the entire af fective

sphere and analogously through the sphere of the will: the dif ference between

value-response and the response to something merely agreeable. We have elab-

orated this distinction in ourEthics, and so it suf fices to refer to this earlier

work.1

1 I want to avoid all misunderstandings by emphatically saying that the term value

in my works has nothing at all to do with the value philosophy of Heinrich Rickert.

It is even different from what Scheler understands by value. Although in Schelers

notion of value as well as in mine, there is a contrast to neutral, indif ferent being,


27/97

But here our task is to refer ag ain to the fundamental dif ference between

the delightfulness that is rooted in value and the delightfulness that is not root-

ed in value. An example of the f irst is the delight I e xperience dwelling in a

beautiful landscape. It is attracti ve and gi ves me joy because of its beauty ,which is a kind of v alue. An example of the delightfulness not rooted in v alue

is the pleasant character of a w arm bath or the enter taining quality of playing

cards. Here it is not a value meriting an appropriate response from me but rather

the quality of the agreeable (we assume that the warm bath is agreeable for me,

playing cards is enjoyable for me) that makes the agreeable thing an objective

good for me. All being-attached that is based on this kind of good , that is,

based on goods that are in the broadest sense of the w ord agreeable without

themselves having value and that are in any case not delightful on the basis of

some value, is radically different from all being attached to objecti ve goodswhich are delightful on the basis of their value.2

16 THENATURE OF LOVE

it has to be emphatically stressed the real nature of value in my sense is not under-

stood as long as the category of importance that I call the merely subjectively sat-

isfying as well as the category that I call the objective good for the person, are not

clearly distinguished from the category of value.

Above all we have to w arn against two further misunderstandings. Some

thinkers connect the ter m value with the tur ning away from concrete individual

goods toward the sphere of the abstract. I w ant to affirm clearly that my concept

of value has nothing to do with an y such flight into the abstract. Other authors

regard values as abstract principles that are supposed to be a substitute for the real

command of the living God. No, values in my sense, and most especially the qual-

itative values, are a ray of light, a reflection of the infinite glory of the living God;

they are a message from God in all created goods and e xist as an ultimate reality

in God Himself, who is, after all, Justice itself, Goodness itself, Love itself.

2 The interest in beautiful music and the desire to hear it, is in its str ucture entirely

different from the interest in the merely agreeable and the subjectively satisfying.

This deep difference in the kind of delightfulness is not, however, primarily a dif-

ference in the object. What matters is our attitude to the good. It is entirely possi-

ble to approach goods of great value in such a way that they are desired only from

the point of view of subjectively satisfying. An example of this is found in the rad-

ical aesthete in his relation to beauty . This is of course a complete per version

because beauty clearly calls us to a value-responding attitude and the aesthete can

never really grasp the value of beauty; though he has all the understanding of the

connoisseur, he remains blind to the real depth of beauty in art and in nature. There

are also goods in relation to which both attitudes are possible without any real per-

version. We can take pleasure in smelling a flo wer that has a splendid aroma and

in doing so we can think only of the ag

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The Nature of Love, Intro. Study Chap. 1, 3, And 9

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